Beijing Sky’s Fifty Shades of Gray

By Adam Minter -
Jan 15, 2013

The week of Aug. 4, 2008, began with
a gray haze hanging over Beijing. This was a problem. And as we
saw in recent days, China’s leaders are still struggling to
solve it.

On the evening of Aug. 8, 2008, the Summer Olympics were
scheduled to open. Since being awarded the games in 2001, the
government had repeatedly promised that the city’s notorious air
pollution would be solved in time for the first events.

Skepticism about the promises had existed from the start.
On Aug. 5 such doubt made a particularly public -- and
embarrassing -- appearance when a small group of U.S. cyclists
arrived at Beijing Capital International Airport wearing black
face masks to protect their finely tuned lungs.

The masks didn’t stay on long. Michael Friedman, one of the
cyclists, pulled his down for a video interview at the airport.
But the damage was done: Images of U.S. athletes guarding
themselves against supposedly dirty Chinese air soon spread
worldwide. Friedman was quoted in the New York Times,
saying that U.S. Olympic officials informed the cyclists that
“the Chinese were mad and that this is a politically charged
issue.”

It wasn’t just official China that noticed: China’s online
communities, represented by blogs and bulletin boards in the
pre-microblogging era, were riled by the images of the masked
Americans. Not every comment was critical -- many Chinese
acknowledged air pollution as a real problem, for foreigners as
well as Chinese -- but many were.

“If you think it’s dirty you don’t have to come. But since
you have come, do not insult us Chinese,” wrote one angry
commenter to the KDS bulletin board, a once-popular Shanghai-
based website. “If you dare to wear a face mask, then we can
sell stars and stripes underwear and wear them on the outside
like superheroes.”

In the heat of the outrage, the American cyclists
apologized. Meanwhile, thanks to a monumental regulatory effort
that shut down coal-burning power plants and construction sites
and pulled millions of vehicles off the roads, Beijing enjoyed
the cleanest air that the city’s youngest residents had ever
known.

Then the Olympics ended, the athletes left and most of the
anti-pollution measures were lifted. Soon, Beijing was back to
business, and the air quality was back to being polluted.

As recently as January 2012, however, Beijingers -- and
most Chinese -- didn’t have access to internationally accepted
data about how polluted it was. That changed when, under popular
pressure (much of it generated on microblogs), the city began
reporting the concentration of small particulates suspended in
the air that are particularly damaging to human health -- known
as PM 2.5 data.

Such data has not been flattering: Beijing’s air quality
regularly falls below World Health Organization standards. One
insidious side effect of this polluted state of affairs is a
general downgrade of the average young Beijinger’s expectations:
If you’ve grown up thinking of blue skies as a rarity, then
another gray, polluted day won’t be anything to complain about.

Even for Beijingers who’ve grown accustomed, if not numb,
to hazy days, the hazardous cloud of toxic smog that descended
on the city late last week was something notably awful, with PM
2.5 measurements rising as high as 933 micrograms per cubic
meter. The WHO guidelines call for achieving a measurement below
25 micrograms per cubic meter over a 24-hour period. By U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency guidelines, anything over 55
micrograms per cubic meter over 24 hours is unhealthy, and
anything over 250 is hazardous.

Still, most Beijingers don’t need a data set to know which
way the wind blows -- or the air quality index trends. Over the
past weekend, all they had to do is look out their windows at
Beijing’s obscured vistas.

Perhaps no site in Beijing is as famous, photographed or
politically significant as the view of Chairman Mao’s portrait
pinned to the Forbidden City, as viewed across the street from
Tiananmen Square. On the morning of Jan. 14 that vista -- or
lack thereof -- also became a popular tweet of the Beijing air-
quality crisis.

Xu Xin, a Beijing lawyer, tweeted a photo of gray -- and
only gray -- to Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging
service, with the accompanying joking message: “No distance is
greater than the one you experience when you are standing in
Tiananmen Square and can’t see Chairman Mao.”

Xu’s tweet -- though likely a mere image of gray not
photographed at the famous vista -- has been forwarded more than
70,000 times since Jan. 14 and generated more than 12,000
comments. Of these comments, several dozen at least do nothing
more than restate the title of the official song from the 2008
Summer Olympics: “Beijing Welcomes You!”

It isn’t just the microbloggers who are invoking the false
promise of Beijing 2008’s temporarily blue skies. Cao Lin, a
microblogging editor and columnist with China Youth Daily, one
of China’s most influential Communist Party-owned newspapers,
published a scathing editorial on the air-quality crisis on
Jan. 14 in which he noted: “Because of worries about Beijing’s
air quality during the Olympic Games, many athletes claimed
that they ‘had to wear masks’ to Beijing. Many people felt
that the gesture was over-the-top, and under some
interpretations it was even viewed as disrespectful. But if
you take a walk in Beijing these days, and see the many
anti-pollution face masks, you will fully understand why
the foreigners were worried.”

Cao goes on to mention that Beijing’s pharmacies have sold
out of face masks, and more and more microbloggers are
confirming his claim. Even worse, the shortage appears to have
spread to other provinces and cities. A young microblogger in
Zhengzhou, a city 450 miles away from Beijing that -- along with
dozens of other Chinese cities -- has also suffered from poor
air quality over the last few days, used Sina Weibo to signal
her distress on Jan. 15: “My head is spinning and I suspect the
air is toxic. I went to the pharmacy to buy a face mask and was
told that they’ve already sold out.” At the time she posted her
tweet, Zhengzhou’s PM 2.5 was at 420 micrograms per cubic meter.

Moments after the young woman in Zhengzhou tweeted her
distress, a Beijing microblogger tweeted his, too: “I went to
buy a mask but they’re out of stock everywhere, so I became a
human flesh air purifier …”

Maybe he won’t have to serve in that capacity for long.
Several emergency measures, including a moratorium on the use of
official cars, were imposed in Beijing on Jan. 14. As of the
evening of Jan. 15 in China, PM 2.5 ratings had dropped from the
“hazardous” levels of the weekend (as determined by the U.S.
EPA), to the merely “very unhealthy.” It’s unclear whether the
emergency measures or a shift in weather patterns (or both) have
made the difference.

In the meantime, the people of Beijing, and their ruling
Communist Party, are left for searching for answers to prevent
what is all but inevitable: Another toxic weekend like the one
just passed. One anonymous Beijing microblogger, tweeting to
Sina Weibo on Jan. 13, offered an idea that should appeal to
everyone: “To solve the air pollution in Beijing we must hold
the Olympics every year.”

(Adam Minter, the Shanghai correspondent for the World
View blog, is writing a book on the global recycling industry.
The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the author of this article: Adam Minter
at ShanghaiScrap@gmail.com.